Bush and Cheney Tell 9/11 Panel of '01 Warnings

By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: April 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 29 — President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were questioned in the Oval Office for more than three hours on Thursday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. They said intelligence warnings they received throughout 2001 suggested that Al Qaeda was poised to strike overseas, not on American soil, according to accounts of commission and administration officials.

After a meeting that both the White House and the commission had billed as historic, Mr. Bush appeared before reporters in the Rose Garden and described the question-and-answer session with the 10 members of the bipartisan commission as "very cordial." He said he "answered every question that they asked."

In its own press statement after a closed-door meeting that began at 9:30 a.m. and ended three hours and 10 minutes later, the commission, which is in the final weeks of its investigation of the 2001 terror attacks, described the Oval Office session as "extraordinary" and said the panel "found the president and the vice president forthcoming and candid."

The setting for the panel's long-awaited interview of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who insisted on talking with the commission together, was orchestrated to take advantage of all of the symbolic power of the Oval Office while making clear that the White House did not consider the meeting to be adversarial.

Administration officials said the president and vice president were seated in wing-back chairs in front of the Oval Office fireplace, with the commission members seated on a pair of couches and several wooden chairs in an informal semicircle around them, the day's strong sunlight streaming in from the windows behind them.

Commission members and the White House agreed to reveal only one substantive matter that came up during the interview: the president's annoyance that the Justice Department had recently provided the Senate with declassified copies of a series of internal department memorandums drafted in the Clinton administration by Jamie S. Gorelick, who was then deputy attorney general. Ms. Gorelick is a Democratic member of the commission.

The president and vice president were not sworn in, which is consistent with the past practice of the commission, which has generally required sworn testimony only when witnesses testify in public. The meeting was not recorded electronically, as a result of a decision made by the White House. The commission was allowed to bring along its staff director as a note taker.

Commission and administration officials said the answers provided by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had been consistent with their previous accounts and with recent testimony to the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks.

In response to disclosures from the panel in recent weeks suggesting that the administration had been lax in dealing with the dire terrorist threats that reached the White House in 2001, Mr. Bush and his senior deputies have said they were aware of intelligence warnings but believed them to refer to threats overseas.

Commission and administration officials said that during the session with the panel Mr. Bush repeated his assertion that the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence briefing about domestic terrorist threats was mostly historical and did not recommend that the White House step up security in the United States.

Commission members said after the Oval Office meeting that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had offered no startling new information about the Sept. 11 attacks. "There were no surprises," said the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, who was named to the position by Mr. Bush. "There was information that we did not have. But it was not information that was a surprise."

He said in an interview that the questioning was "very sharp but very fair — by sharp, I mean in the sense of intellectually sharp." He continued: "We learned things we did not know about the events of the day of 9/11 and, very importantly, the president gave us real insights into his thinking."

Mr. Kean said that despite speculation among Congressional Democrats and other critics that Mr. Cheney might try to dominate the session, "the opposite was true" and the president had handled nearly three-quarters of the questions raised by the commissioners. If the public had been allowed to witness the meeting, he said, "I think they would have had a lot more confidence in our government."

Another of the panel's Republicans, John F. Lehman, Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, said Mr. Bush had answered the panel's questions with little hesitation or need for assistance from Mr. Cheney or Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, who attended the session along with two other White House lawyers.

He said Mr. Gonzales had said little. "He chimed in on some questions where he was able to clarify some dates and facts," Mr. Lehman said. "The questioning of the president did not pull any punches. It was very direct. And the president was equally sharp but polite in responding."

A Democrat on the panel, Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska who is now president of the New School in New York, said he had also been impressed by the president. "He answered directly and completely and in a very cordial and respectful way," Mr. Kerrey said, adding that the session would "improve the quality of our report."

Despite what both sides agreed was the polite, even friendly tone of the meeting, the commissioners were treated as outsiders by the White House. They were seen being searched by hand for weapons before they stepped into the Oval Office, a requirement for all visitors to the White House apart from many foreign leaders.

Their notebooks were taken from them before they left the session, with the White House saying they would be returned after being reviewed for classified information.

In an appearance before reporters after the session, the president offered his first public explanation for why the White House had wanted him and Mr. Cheney to be interviewed together. Mr. Bush said he had wanted the commission to understand how he and Mr. Cheney operated as a team — both on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath.

"I wanted them to know how I set strategy, how we run the White House, how we deal with threats," Mr. Bush said. "The vice president answered a lot of their questions — answered all their questions. And I think it was important for them to see our body language as well, how we work together."

Asked if the commission had questioned Mr. Bush about the possibility that Qaeda terrorists were still in the United States, Mr. Bush said, "No, they didn't, but I'm not going to get into any more details about what they asked me." He added that "we are still vulnerable to attack." The length and cordiality of the meeting — commission members said the session ended only when the panel signaled that it had run out of questions and after two commissioners had left because of other appointments — was in stark contrast to the earlier relationship between the panel and the White House.

Mr. Bush had initially opposed creation of the panel, and his lawyers struggled for months last year to prevent the commission from getting access to highly classified Oval Office intelligence reports.

The Democratic panel members who have been mostly sharply critical of the White House in the past praised the meeting on Thursday.

"The president was very forthcoming and answered all of our questions," said Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor. "I don't think we have the need to ask any further questions of the president."

Despite the grave nature of much of the questioning about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, members of the commission said there was frequent laughter during the questioning of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.

James R. Thompson, the former Republican governor of Illinois, said the president could be a "bit of a tease" in his dealing with commissioners and over all praised Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for "five-star performances."

Mr. Lehman said Mr. Bush would sometimes get a "twinkle in his eye" to make clear that he was acquainted with some of the more heated moments of past public hearings by the commission, in which Democrats on the panel had harshly interrogated administration witnesses.

"He let us know that he had read some of the more, shall we say, impassioned statements of some of the commissioners, that he was aware of some of the public utterances," Mr. Lehman said. "The president got off a couple of good shots. Some of the commissioners got off a couple in return."

Bremer Warning Reported

WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) — The head of the United States-led coalition in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, warned six months before the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration seemed to be paying no attention to terrorism and appeared to "stagger along" on the issue.

Mr. Bremer, who in 1999 was chairman of a national commission on terrorism, gave a speech on Feb. 26, 2001, in which he said the "general terrorist threat" was increasing. "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism," Mr. Bremer said in remarks to the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation.

"What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, `Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?' "

"That's too bad. They've been given a window of opportunity with very little terrorism now, and they're not taking advantage of it. Maybe the folks in the press ought to be pushing a little bit."